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Trajectories of Resistance and Shifting Forms of Workers’ Activism in Iran

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 December 2021

M. Stella Morgana
M. Stella Morgana*
Affiliation:
Lecturer, Department of Political Science, University of Amsterdam
*
Email: m.s.morgana@uva.nl
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Abstract

This article navigates ruptures and transformations in the processes of resistance performed by Iranian workers between two key events of the history of contemporary Iran: the 1979 Revolution and the 2009 Green Movement. It explores how labor activism emerged in the Islamic Republic, and illustrates how it managed to survive. Drawing from the concepts of resistance, collective awareness and counter-conduct as its theoretical basis – between Antonio Gramsci and Michel Foucault – the article details the changing strategies that workers adopted over time and space to cope with the absence of trade unions, monitoring activities, and repression in the workplace. It demonstrates that workers' agency was never fully blocked by the Islamic Republic. However, it tests the limits imposed by the social context to discourage activism, beyond state coercive measures and policies.

Type
Freestanding Articles
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 101: Invisible Labor in Carceral Spaces , Spring 2022 , pp. 164 - 183
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc., 2021

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References

Notes

1. Reza Kangarani, “Kārgarān va Showrā-hā -ye Eslāmi-ye Kār (Workers and the Islamic Councils of Labor),” Andisheh-ye Jāmʿeh no. 16 (Ordibehesht 1380/April 2001): 10–12.

2. Morgana, M. Stella, “Talking to Workers: From Khomeini to Ahmadinejad, how the Islamic Republic's Discourse on Labor Changed through May Day Speeches (1979‒2009),” Iranian Studies 52, 1–2 (2019): 133–58CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. Former labor activist. Conversation with the author, Tehran, March 2018.

4. For a definition of informal activism and platforms see Asef Bayat, Life as Politics. How Ordinary People Change the Middle East (Stanford, CA, 2010).

5. See Farhad Nomani and Sohrab Behdad, “Labor Rights and the Democracy Movement in Iran:

Building a Social Democracy,” Northwestern journal of international Human Rights, vol. 10, no. 4 (2012), 212–30; Andreas Malm and Shora Esmailian, Iran on the Brink: Rising Workers and Threats of War (London; Ann Arbor, MI, 2007); Sina Moradi, “Labour Activism and Democracy in Iran,” Working Paper 22, Humanist Institute for Cooperation with Developing Countries, The Hague (July 2013).

6. Morgana, M. Stella, “Produce and ‘Consume’ in the Islamic Republic: The 1990s Myth of the Winner in the Iranian Public Sphere and Its Impact on Workers,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 52, no. 2 (2020): 340–44CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Shahram Khosravi, Precarious Lives. Waiting and Hope in Iran (Philadelphia, PA 2017), 11–12 and 214; and Fariba Adelkhah, Being Modern in Iran (London, 1999), 139–60.

7. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish. The Birth of the Prison (New York, 1975), 210.

8. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (New York, 1980), 9.

9. See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality (New York, 1980), 95; and Pickett, Brent L., Polity vol. 28, no. 4 (Summer, 1996): 445–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10. Charles Tripp, The Power and the People: Paths of Resistance in the Middle East (Cambridge, 2013), 6.

11. Foucault, Michel, “The History of Sexuality: An Interview,” Oxford Literary Review vol. 4, no. 2, 1980: 13CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12. See Said Amir Arjomand, “Dual Leadership and Constitutional Developments after Khomeini,” in After Khomeini: Iran Under His Successors (Oxford, 2009), 36–55.

13. See Alamdari, Kazem, “The power structure of the Islamic Republic of Iran: Transition from populism to clientelism, and militarization of the government,” Third World Quarterly 26: 8 (2005), 1285–301CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

14. Former Green Movement activist. Interview with the author, January 2018.

15. Similar mechanisms also occurred among student activists, as explored by Rivetti, Paola and Cavatorta, Francesco, “Iranian student activism between authoritarianism and democratization: patterns of conflict and cooperation between the Office for the Strengthening of Unity and the regime,” Democratization 21: 2 (2014), 289–310CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and Saeid Golkar “Student Activism, Social Media, and Authoritarian Rule in Iran” in Epstein I. (eds) The Whole World is Texting. Pittsburgh Studies in Comparative and International Education (Rotterdam, 2015).

16. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci (New York, 1971), 146–47; and Hobsbawm, Eric, “Gramsci and Political Theory,” Marxism Today 21 (7): 208Google Scholar.

17. See Enrico Augelli and Craig N. Murphy, “Consciousness, myth and collective action: Gramsci, Sorel and the ethical state,” in Innovation and Transformation in International Studies, ed. Stephen Gill and James H. Mittelman (London, 1997), 25–38.

18. Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks of Antonio Gramsci, 146–47.

19. Hobsbawm, “Gramsci and Political Theory,” 208–9.

20. Michel Foucault, “Subject and Power” in Power: Essential Works of Michel Foucault 1954–1984.

21. See Michel Foucault, Power/knowledge. Selected interviews and other writings 1972–1977 (New York, 1980); and David Couzens Hoy, Critical resistance: From Poststructuralism to Post-Critique (London, 2004), 81–83.

22. Michel Foucault, “The Ethics of the Concern for Self as a Practice of Freedom,” in Michel Foucault, Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinov, 1997, 292.

23. Marcus Schulzke, “Power and Resistance: Linking Gramsci and Foucault” in David Kreps eds, Gramsci and Foucault: A Reassessment (Burlington, 2015), 71.

24. Michel Foucault, “Questions of method,” in G. Burchell, C. Gordon, and P. Miller, eds., The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality (Chicago, 1991), 76–78.

25. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” Critical Inquiry vol. 8., no. 4, (Summer 1982): 790, 777–95.

26. Ibid. 96.

27. Michel Foucault, “What is critique,” in Michel Foucault, The Politics of Truth, ed. S. Lotringer; trans. L. Hochroth and C. Porter (Los Angeles), 75.

28. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977 – 1978, ed. M. Senellart, trans. G. Burchell, (Basingstoke, 2007), 357.

29. See OIPF, Kārgarān Pishtāz-e Jonbesh-e Tudeh in Mansoor Moaddel, “Class Struggle in Post-revolutionary Iran.” International Journal of Middle East Studies 23 (1991): 323.

30. See Abrahamian, Iran Between Two Revolutions, 510–25.

31. Ibid. 512–13.

32. Ibid. 533–35.

33. See Ashraf, Ahmad and Banuazizi, Ali, “The State, Classes and Modes of Mobilization in the Iranian Revolution,” State, Culture and Society vol. 1. no. 3 (Spring 1985): 34Google Scholar, and Misagh Parsa, Democracy in Iran, Why It Failed and How It Might Succeed (London, 2016).

34. For a detailed overview of oil workers’ role in the 1979 revolution see Peyman Jafari, “Fluid History: Oil Workers and the Iranian Revolution,” in Working for Oil: Comparative Social Histories of Labor in the Global Oil Industry, edited by T. Atabaki, E. Bini and K. Ehsani (London, 2018), 69–98.

35. See Habib Ladjevardi, Labor Unions and Autocracy in Iran (Syracuse, NY, 1985); Misagh Parsa, Democracy in Iran (Cambridge, MA, 2016), 75–76.

36. The political impact of the Iranian workers as a class on the revolution is debated beyond the paralyzing effect of their strikes on the economic system, as discussed by Ahmad Ashraf, in “Kalbod-shekāfi Enqelāb: Naqsh-e Kārgarān-e San'ati dar Enqelāb-e Irān [Autopsy of the Revolution: The Role of Industrial Workers in the Iranian Revolution], Goftogu, 55 (2010): 55–123.

37. Oil worker who participated in the revolution. Interview with the author. Tehran, April 2019. See also Youssef Ibrahim, “Despite Army's presence, Iranian oil town is challenging the Shah,” New York Times, November 19, 1978.

38. For more elaboration on the role of the Left and the impact of the different Marxist groups on workers during the Iranian revolution, see Val Moghadam, “Socialism or Anti-Imperialism? The Left and Revolution in Iran,” New Left Review, no. 166 (Nov. –Dec., 1987), 5–28, and Misagh Parsa, Social Origins of the Iranian Revolution, (London, Rutgers University Press), 141–167; and Peyman Vahabzadeh, Guerrilla Odyssey. Modernization, Secularism, Democracy, and the Fādāʿi Period of National Liberation in Iran, 1971–1979 (Syracuse, NY, 2010), 176–77.

39. Kayhan, January 16, 1979.

40. Misagh Parsa, State, Ideologies and Social Revolution, 172.

41. Ervand Abrahamian, “Iran in Revolution: The Opposition Forces,” MERIP Reports no. 75–76, (Mar.–Apr. 1979): 3–8.

42. New York Times, November 19, 1978.

43. Akhbar, 1979, No. 10, cited in Parsa, Social Origins of the Iranian Revolution, 161.

44. Abrahamian, “Iran in Revolution: The Opposition Forces,” MERIP, 1979, 3–8.

45. For Khomeinist slogans see Abrahamian, Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic, 31.

46. See Peter J. Chelkowski, and Hamid Dabashi. Staging a Revolution: The Art of Persuasion in the Islamic Republic of Iran (New York, 1999), 9–10, Ervand Abrahamian, Khomeinism: Essays on the Islamic Republic (Berkeley, CA, 1993), 71; and Morgana, M. Stella, “The Islamic Republican Party of Iran in the Factory: Control over Workers’ Discourse in Posters (1979–1987),” Iran 56, 2 (2018): 237–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

47. Asef Bayat, “Labor and democracy in post-revolutionary Iran”, in Post-revolutionary Iran ed by Hooshang Amir Ahmadi and Manoucher Parvin (London), 41–54.

48. Moaddel, Mansoor, “Class Struggle in Post-Revolutionary Iran,” International Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 23 (1991): 329CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

49. This point is the fruit of several interviews with the author, Tehran, July 2017 and May 2019.

50. Farhad Nomani and Sohrab Behdad, Class and Labor in Iran: Did the Revolution Matter? 37.

51. Oil Workers, “How We Paralyzed the Shah's Regime,” Payam-Danesju/MERIP, 75/76 (March–April 1979): 20–28.

52. Ibid.

53. See Saeed Rahnema, “Work Council in Iran: Illusion of Worker Control,” Economic and Industrial Democracy February 1992, vol. 13 (1): 69–94, and Haideh Moghissi and Saeed Rahnem, “The Working Class and the Islamic State in Iran.” Socialist Register 37 (2001): 207–8.

54. See Asef Bayat, Workers and Revolution in Iran. A Third World Experience of Workers’ Control (London, 1987), 181–84 and Bayat, “Historiography, Class, and Iranian Workers” in Workers and Working Classes in the Middle East, ed. by Zachary Lockman (New York, 1994), 200–3.

55. According to Bayat (1987), the post-revolutionary history can be divided into three different phases. From an initial period of “power vacuum” in the factories and the illusion of “control from below” (1978–1979), Iran experienced a second stage of management from above (1979–1981), followed by the imposition of Islamist control over labor.

56. Nomani and Behdad, Class and Labor in Iran: Did the Revolution Matter?, 101.

57. Qānun-e Showrāhā-ye Eslāmi Kār (Law on Islamic Councils of Labor), Majles. Available at http://rc.majlis.ir/fa/law/show/91022

58. See Bayat, Workers and Revolution, 186.

59. Reza Kangarani, “Kārgarān va Showrāhā-ye Eslāmi-ye Kār (Workers and the Islamic Councils of Labor),” Andisheh-ye Jāmʿeh no. 16, (Ordibehesht 1380/April 2001): 10–12.

60. See also Joel Beinin, “Sanitizing the Tunisian Revolution,” 12 October 2015. Accessed 31 September 2018. Available here http://stanfordpress.typepad.com/blog/2015/10/sanitizing-the-tunisian-revolution.html.

61. See also Peyman Jafari, “Introduction: Against All Odds – Labor Activism in the Middle East” in Workers of the World – International Journal on Strikes and Social Conflicts no. 7 (2015): 7, 6–13.

62. See Qānun-e Showrā-hā-ye Eslāmi Kār (Law on Islamic Councils of Labor), Majles. Available at http://rc.majlis.ir/fa/law/show/91022.

63. Mohammad Maljoo, “The Unmaking of the Iranian Working Class since the 1990s,” in Iran's Struggles for Social Justice, ed. by Peyman Vahabzadeh (London, 2017): 47–63.

64. Former labor activist and academic. Conversation with the author on Skype, March 2017.

65. Sohrab Behdad, Farhad Nomani, “Iranian Labor and the Struggle for Independent Unions,” Tehran Bureau – PBS, April 2011. Accessed on 2 October 2018. Available here https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tehranbureau/2011/04/labors-struggle-for-independent-unions.html.

66. See Morgana, “Produce and ‘Consume’ in the Islamic Republic: The 1990s Myth of the Winner in the Iranian Public Sphere and Its Impact on Workers,” International Journal of Middle East Studies, 340–44.

67. Asef Bayat, Street Politics: Poor People's Movement in Iran (New York, 1997), 106–7.

68. Ibid.

69. New York Times, June 1, 1992. Accessed 20 October 2018, available here https://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/01/world/violence-spreads-in-iran-as-the-poor-are-evicted.html.

70. Ibid.

71. New York Times, July 16, 1999. Available here https://www.nytimes.com/1999/07/16/world/town-hushed-in-95-crackdown-sees-no-reason-to-join-iran-riots.html.

72. Radio Tehran, 14 Farvardin 1374, 3 April 1995. Confirmed by an Iranian scholar in a conversation with the author, Tehran, August 2017 and March 2019. See also “Iran Police Open Fire on Protesters,” Upi archives, April 4, 1995, available here https://www.upi.com/Archives/1995/04/04/Iranian-police-open-fire-on-protesters/2958796968000/.

73. Labor Law, article 7. Iran Data Portal, Syracuse University. 1990, available here in Persian http://irandataportal.syr.edu/wp-content/uploads/labor-law-2.pdf and here in English http://irandataportal.syr.edu/labor-law.

74. Interview with workers. Tehran, March-April 2019.

75. Iranian workers statement, IASWI. Available at https://workers-iran.org/old/asalem.htm.

76. Kār, “Eʿtesābāt Sarāsari Kārgarān Sanʿat Naft (Oil Workers Strikes),” Bahman 1375 – February 1997, no. 298: 1–3.

77. Kār, “Tazāhorāt-e Hezarān az Kārgarān Sanʿat Naft (Demonstration of thousand oil workers), Esfand 1375- March 1997, no. 299: 4.

78. Committee for the Defense and Support of the Iranian Workers (Communist Party of Iran, Iranian Workers Left Unity, Iranian refugee Workers Association), “Iranian Oil Workers Arrested,” February 16, 1997. Available at http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/51/086.html.

79. Ibid.

80. Ibid.

81. Quoted in a Statement of Confederation of Free Trade Unions. Available here http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/51/090.html.

82. See Morgana, “Talking to Workers: From Khomeini to Ahmadinejad, how the Islamic Republic's Discourse on Labor Changed through May Day Speeches (1979‒2009),” Iranian Studies, 133–58.

83. Independent scholar. Conversation with the author, Tehran, August 2017. See also Sohrab Behdad, “From Populism to Liberalism: the Iranian Predicament,” in Parvin Alizadeh The Economy of Iran: Dilemmas of an Islamic State (London and New York, 2000).

84. Worker, interview with the author. Tehran, October 2018.

85. Kayhan, 24 Mordad 1393, August 2004.

86. Legal expert, interview with the author. Tehran, May 2019.

87. See Majles, amendments of Labor Law as approved on 27 January 2003 [7 Bahman 1381]. Available here: http://rc.majlis.ir/fa/law/ show/122666.

88. IRNA, 24 Ordibehesht 1382. English translation Payvand, 15 May 2003 http://www.payvand.com/news/03/may/1084.html .

89. Khordād, 15 Dey 1377, January 5, 1999.

90. Rāh-e Kārgar, 24 Tir 1378, July 15, 1999. Translation available here https://workers-iran.org/old/archives.htm.

91. Ibid.

92. International Labor Organization, ILO. Report no. 337, 2005.

93. Etehādchap Kārgari (Workers Left Unity Iran), 8 June 2005, in Yassamine Mather & Majid Tamjidi, “Iran Khodro,” Critique, 19.

94. Sohrab Behdad and Farhad Nomani, “Iranian Labor and the Struggle for Independent Unions,” Tehran Bureau – PBS, April 2011. Accessed on 2 October 2018.

95. This affirmation is confirmed by the author's archival research and fieldwork interviews between 2017 and 2019.

96. Green Movement activist. Conversation with the author, Tehran, February 2018.

97. Shahram Khosravi, “The Precarious Status of Working-Class Men in Iran,” Current History vol. 116, no. 794: 355.

98. Akhbar-e Rooz, 22 Dey 1391, January 11, 2013. Available here http://www.akhbar-rooz.com/article.jsp?essayId=50292.

99. Ibid.

100. Asr-e Nou, “Jāmʿeh Bandi Se Sālhā-ye Mobārezat-e Kārgarān Sendikā-ye Sherkat-e Vahed” Sum up of three years of Workers’ Struggles of the Syndicate United Company, 11 Bahman 1387/30 January 2009. Available here http://asre-nou.net/php/view.php?objnr=2054.

101. See “Kārgarān Haft Tapeh az Sāzmān-e Jahāni Kār Komak Khāstand,” Haft Tapeh Workers ask International Labor Organization for help, 11 Mehr 1386, October 3, 2007 and Worker-Today (Persian). Available here http://www.bbc.com/persian/business/story/2007/10/071003_mf_hafttappe.shtml and here http://www.worker-today.com/gozaresh/7tapeh_1.htm.

102. See International Labor Organization, Report No. 346 (2007), available here http://www.ilo.org/dyn/normlex/en/f?p=NORMLEXPUB:50002:0::NO::P50002_COMPLAINT_TEXT_ID:2910267.

103. See a list in Persian here http://www.ofros.com/payvandha.htm.

104. This was confirmed to the author by several activists and ordinary people met in Iran between 2017 and 2019.

105. See M. Stella Morgana, “Precarious Workers and Neoliberal Narratives in Post-Revolutionary Iran: Top-down Strategies and Bottom-up Responses,” Middle East Institute, MAP Project, January 28, 2020.

106. See Mohammad Maljoo, “Tabaqeh Kārgar pas az Entekhābāt Dahom: Enzevā ya E'telāf” [The Working Class after the Elections: Isolation or Coalition], Goftogu 55 (1389): 7–16. See also “Iran After the Elections,” Jacobin magazine, 5 November 2016. Available here https://www.jacobinmag.com/2016/05/iran-elections-rouhani-reformists-nuclear-deal/. Last accessed 23 October 2018.